Clinton: Talk and Fight at the Same Time

Oct. 21, 2011

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U.S. Focuses on Haqqani Network

Following the deaths of major al Qaeda figures in Pakistan, the U.S. has clearly shifted its focus to the Afghan Taliban -- most notably the Haqqani network, which is responsible for more U.S. deaths than any other insurgent group in Afghanistan.

The turning points, say U.S. officials, were a series of events around the 10th anniversary of 9/11. A few months before the anniversary, the U.S. was told by the Pakistani military that meeting with a senior member of the Haqqani network might help reconciliation efforts, according to a U.S. and a Pakistani official.

But the meeting went nowhere, and the Haqqani network unleashed two of the most memorable attacks of the war: On Sept. 10, a truck bomb wounded 77 U.S. soldiers, and on Sept. 13, militants fired rockets into the U.S. embassy and NATO's military headquarters in Kabul.

The U.S. responded with force. In the weeks that followed the attacks, the U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan increased its tempo against the Haqqani network, and the CIA turned its sights on Miran Shah, the Haqqani's stronghold in North Waziristan. Two strikes hit a suburb of the city, the first time the area had been struck in more than a year -- a message, U.S. officials said, that it would aggressively pursue Haqqani militants on both sides of the border.

At the same time, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen called the Haqqani network "a veritable arm" of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. The strikes, a senior U.S. official said, were a way to communicate to the Pakistanis that the Haqqani network was going to be the U.S.'s number one focus from now on.

Pakistan needs to "cut off all connections between elements of the military or the intelligence service who provide information and give advance notice -- we know for a fact -- to certain elements of these terrorist groups," Clinton, who one U.S. official said helped authorize the military onslaught, told ABC News.

"What is not manageable or acceptable are the safe havens," Clinton continued. "It's one thing for a rogue group of Frontier Corps or Afghan police to be shooting back and forth across the border. It is something entirely different for there to be, in settled areas of Pakistan, the headquarters of groups that are directing actions against our troops, that are running operations against our troops, that are killing Americans and Afghans. And that's what has to stop."

The U.S. accuses the Pakistani military and the ISI of supporting or at the very least ignoring the safe havens that the Haqqani network uses in Pakistan to attack Afghanistan. Pakistan's top diplomat, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, made the rare admission Friday that there are, in fact, safe havens inside Pakistan for militants.

But the public U.S. accusations have angered the Pakistani military, which did not hold back its criticism of the U.S. side at the beginning of Thursday's four-hour meetings.

The Pakistani security official described U.S. criticism as a rhetorical "offensive" that "denies a space of cooperation and is not the way forward for a good relationship. And it's not constructive at all. Our position was very clear on that."

"We can't afford just to support a group at the cost of 43 nations in Afghanistan," he said.

Clinton urged the Pakistanis to publicly declare their support for political talks with Afghan insurgents, saying she expected actions within "days or weeks." But she left open the door that the U.S. would act unilaterally if the Pakistanis did not provide the help the U.S. was looking for.

"Our actions will depend on whether they cooperate or not," Clinton said in the interview with ABC News.

And though the initial meeting with the Haqqani network failed, Clinton said the U.S. must try a concerted effort to make peace -- and if it doesn't work, "at least we tried."